Tech —

Microsoft Surface with Windows 8 Pro: Hotter, Thicker, Faster, Louder

What happens when you take Surface RT and add an Intel processor and hi-res screen?

More troublesome is the Web, where most of the time you have only a single image available. Surface Pro's Internet Explorer retains the 1.4× scaling factor, or at least something close to it. Although 1920×1080 with a 1.4× factor provides an effective resolution of 1371×771—a fraction larger than Surface RT—Surface Pro shows less of each webpage than Surface RT does. The discrepancy isn't huge, but it is odd; it should, if anything, show more.

Enlarge/ Metro Internet Explorer on Surface RT manages to show the sub-head for the second story on the left.

Enlarge/ On the Surface Pro, however, Metro Internet Explorer can't show the sub-head for the second story.

The desktop has much the same issue, only a little worse. Essentially no desktop applications will provide 1.25×-scaled resources, so every bitmap will be enlarged by a difficult amount. Fine detail and single-pixel lines will be damaged by this scaling. The lower scaling factor gives an effective resolution of 1536×864. It's a little more spacious than the Surface RT desktop, making it a more comfortable place to work and multitask. This different scaling factor has the same repercussion for webpages as the Metro scaling factor, and also means that pages look slightly different depending on whether you're looking at them in desktop Internet Explorer or Metro Internet Explorer. It's yet another way in which the Windows 8 experience feels disjointed.

Enlarge/ Desktop Internet Explorer on Surface RT cuts off the headline of the second story.

Even more strange? The desktop Internet Explorer shows more of the page than the Metro one on Surface Pro, as well as more than the Surface RT desktop browser.

Enlarge/ On Surface Pro, however, the subhead is peeking out. Why can't it show this much in Metro?

This non-integer scaling is more or less imperceptible for photographic content. But for other bitmaps—screenshots, diagrams, logos, and so on—it's quite noticeable, and I really don't like it. Here are two photos taken from the middle of this page:

I know the pictures aren't quite framed identically; it's times like this that I wish I had a MP/E 65mm and rig to hold it. You might want to click through to see the full-size images, too. First, it's clear that yes, text looks quite a bit smoother on the Pro, thanks to its higher resolution. There is some visible staircasing in the RT's fonts. But then we look at the bitmap, the screenshot of the browser address bar. On the RT, this screenshot is crisp and accurate. On the Pro it isn't; it's blurry. This is particularly acute for the green "https" text; in real life, it looks almost smudged. That's unavoidable when scaling by non-integers. For photographs and similar material the differences are hard to see, but on anything with hard outlines and high contrast, the difference is really quite noticeable, and not in a good way.

These scaling factors also have repercussions for those desktop apps that try to be touch-aware. Chief among them is Office 2013. Although I'm not impressed with the concessions Office 2013 makes to touch input, it does at least try. Enable touch mode and the ribbon gets much larger and easier to hit. Unfortunately, the enlarging of the ribbon doesn't appear to properly take into account the effect of DPI. As a result, Office 2013's touch mode is physically smaller than Office RT's. The Office 2013 ribbon in touch mode includes more buttons and text labels, but its touch targets are smaller as a result.

Enlarge/ Word 2013 on Surface Pro in touch mode. Note how there are more styles available and some of the icons that were unlabeled on the Surface Pro now have text. That's because the touch targets have all been shrunk.

If I were to guess, I would say that Office 2013's touch mode is basing its calculations on the raw screen resolution, and not taking into account the higher DPI. That seems like a remarkable oversight, but I'm not sure what else would explain it.

The pertinent word here is "compromise." Apple's solution to the scaling problem is to use resolutions that are integer multiples of one another; specifically, Apple's scaling factor is 2×. Integer multiples are much easier than the fractions that Microsoft uses; bitmaps will remain crisp, fine detail won't become blurry. Apple can do this because Apple simply mandates the use of screens with unusual resolutions, such as the iPad's 2048×1536. Microsoft, however, has an eye on its OEMs and bargain basement pricing. That means picking resolutions that are aligned with TVs and cheap.

While this is not a Surface Pro issue as such—it is an issue that'll affect every machine using fractional scaling—it is an issue the Surface Pro suffers from. Non-integral scaling will inevitably result in visible scaling artifacts. That the scaling factor differs between Metro and the desktop just makes things worse. Both sides will look wonky, but they'll look differently wonky.

Stylus

Stylus-driven interfaces like Windows Mobile and Microsoft's past tablet offerings have been roundly mocked as awkward and inconvenient. That's probably not unfair. But having a stylus in addition to finger-based touch? That works well.

Windows 8's handwriting recognition is nothing short of miraculous, and I found the pen was accurate and precise. I'm afraid I'm not a digital artist and haven't used standalone styli or anything like that, so I can't compare it to dedicated devices. But it appears to work as it should.

Enlarge/ The stylus works, and when it's near the screen touch input is rejected, as it should be.

I also found myself using the pen to navigate the desktop. The pen is not quite as precise as a mouse cursor, but it's a great deal better than a finger and the pen is certainly sufficient to use most desktop applications. While this is more of an indictment of the keyboard covers' touchpads than it is an endorsement of the pen, it's nonetheless useful as a fallback.